Google Restricts Web Searches for Sharing Site The Pirate Bay

Google no longer allows its auto-complete search function to call up searches for The Pirate Bay Website as it fights to prevent copyright infringement.

Google is making it harder for users to access The Pirate Bay Website, part of its growing efforts to limit search access to Websites that illegally share copyrighted content.
Google announced its stepped-up effort in August, and The Pirate Bay, a file-sharing site, is the latest target. The Pirate Bay has been removed from Google's "auto-complete" search function, meaning that users can't begin typing in the site's name and then watch it auto-complete in the browser.

The move was reported in a story Sept. 11 by the BBC.com as a way that Google is working to prevent the use of auto-complete to find materials that infringe on copyrights.

The Google action, however, doesn't prevent searchers from eventually reaching The Pirate Bay Website if they type in the complete address.
Google began censoring links to other pirated material in its instant and auto-complete tools last year, according to the BBC. "According to the TorrentFreak news Website, Google added The Pirate Bay to its list toward the beginning of August, leading to a sharp decline in the amount of search results it displayed for the file-sharing site," the BBC reported.
Google's auto-complete capability allows Web searchers to seek search results more quickly by using an algorithm that predicts and displays searches based on searches by other users, according to Google. "We also apply a narrow set of removal policies for pornography, violence, hate speech and terms that are frequently used to find content that infringes copyrights," Google states in its auto-complete documentation page.

The BBC, however, reported that in the case of The Pirate Bay site, "the move may be largely symbolic, as it does not seem to have had an impact on the number of people using The Pirate Bay."
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the auto-complete changes.